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Guest Post By Beth Peluse
Picture your dream vacation. Does it involve beer? We are guessing it does, since you are on the Road Trips for Beer website.
I would like to throw out a dream vacation …

Gift Idea for Beer Geeks: Craft Brewery T-shirts

Craft beer geeks love collecting T-shirts, either from a brewery they have visited or one they have on their Road Trips for Beer itineraries.

Craft Brewed Clothing Co., a start-up company based in New Mexico took that desire and packaged it into a convenient form: The Craft Brewery T-Shirt of the Month Club.

Joshua Slyman, CTO (Chief T-Shirt Officer) and Jason Walker, BEO (Brewery Evaluation Officer) created the concept to benefit both small breweries and their current or potential customers.

“The idea is to get the word out about these smaller breweries,” Slyman said. “A lot of them don’t get a chance to get their clothing out beyond the hundred miles they serve. It gets them a little bit of national exposure. It’s really about craft brewing for us, and supporting the industry.”

Each month, members of the club receive the T-shirt in the mail, often along with some other swag. Slyman was kind enough to send a sample package to Road Trips for Beer that included:

A high-quality T-shirt from New Mexico’s Santa Fe Brewery.

A sticker and a coaster from the brewery.

An info card about Santa Fe Brewery.

A bumper sticker from Craft Brewed Clothing (“Work is the curse of the drinking class.”)

An info sheet on the Craft Brewery T-Shirt of the Month Club.

A “New Mexico Beer Map” from that state’s Brewers Guild.

Not every package will necessarily include all of that.

“It depends on the individual brewery. We provide the T-shirts; the breweries provide the other little pieces of swag,” Slyman said. “It might be two different coasters instead of stickers, (but) you’ll get an info card with each one.”

Several options are available, from a one-month membership currently $19.95 to a 12-month membership for $219.40.

Before we go much further, anyone interested in joining can go to craftbrewedclothing.com for the specifics. And just for Road Trips for Beer readers, the club generously offered a discount of $19.95 off of a 12-month membership – a free T-shirt, basically. All you need to do is enter the code “FLORIDALOVE” when you sign up.

Jason Walker behind the booth at the recent Reno CanFest.

The situation is a win-win for small breweries, Slyman said. The company has been doing marketing for the New Mexico Brewers Guild and several breweries in the region for about five years.

“In our conversations with the Brewers Guild, we realized that there was a big need, especially for up-and-coming breweries, to get apparel,” he said. “It’s really just an investment for them and it costs them all sorts of money . They have to sit on the product for a long time. We went back and started thinking about how we could solve this problem for brewers.”

The company takes on the cost of printing each shirt, and at the end of the month, the featured brewery gets a cut of the revenue.